Art in an Octagon: The Schinkel Pavilion Berlin

The Schinkel Pavilon in Berlin-Mitte is perhaps Germany?s most unconventional art association. Where GDR nomenklatura once held cocktail parties, now Douglas Gordon, Cyprien Gaillard and Isa Genzken hold exhibitions. ... more

19/07/2005

From the Feuilletons is a weekly overview of what's been happening in the German-language cultural pages and appears every Friday at 3 pm. CET.. Here a key to the German newspapers.

Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 19.07.2005

Ludwig Amman presents various books on the situation of Muslim women. One that doesn't impress him at all is Somali-Dutch authorAyaan Hirsi Ali's
polemic "I Accuse": "The right-wing liberal member of parliament has
adopted the most confrontational strategy possible. It certainly makes
for inspirational art when Hirsi Ali counters male sanctioning of
cruelty against women with verses from the Koran. But it becomes a concerted lie when she makes 'Islam itself' responsible for the failure of integration, and even for evils like female circumcision, in her polemics â why not the lack of education?" By contrast, Amman recommends "Choke on your Lies", which documents the suffering of the Turkish-German womanÂ Inci Y, as necessary reading.

Süddeutsche Zeitung, 19.07.2005

Egyptian writer Nawal el-Saadawi explains to Sonja Zekri why she is no longer campaigning for the office of president: the elections are not fair. And she describes how fierce the reactions to her candidacy in the fall were: "I was the first, so everyone pounced on me: the Muslim brothers, the Copts, the right-wing capitalists. They wrote that I was crazy, that I had been bought by the communists as well as by America, that I was pro-Israel but also for Islamic terror. It was grotesque. A Mufti said that women cannot be presidents because they menstruate. I could have assuaged him: I'm 74."

In the year marking the 200th anniversary of the death of German poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller (more here),
Christopher Schmidt has travelled throughout Germany viewing
productions of Schiller's plays. Many stage directors have problems
with the "jaundiced pathos in the little yellow editions put out by Reclam publishers", he comments. "The historical optimist Schiller is in a way the old 68er among
German classical writers. And for that reason, productions of his plays
today reflect the same debunking process seen in the settling of
accounts with the revolutionary 68er generation. One representative of
this generation, current foreign minister Joschka Fischer (who
went from police-bashing student radical to Green party politician to
Germany's top diplomat), once said he lost his idealism, but not his
ideals, on the Long March through the institutions. Robert Musil by contrast wrote that ideals are dead idealism, 'rotten residue'.
This sentiment is reflected in the embarrassment today's directors feel
when they hear the name Schiller. And it can be traced back to their
reaction to 68er politics, which spends its time shifting its own rot."

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 19.07.2005

Patrick Bahners probes the moral depths of the decision that German President Köhler is faced with, namely whether to allow the motion of non-confidence instigated by Chancellor Schröder to hold fresh federal elections in the fall. Bahners considers the current predicament trickier than the same one faced by President Karl Carstens in 1983, following a parliamentary vote of non-confidence in Chancellor Kohl. "In 1983, Carstens could plausibly argue that the dwindling of credibility that followed the constructive vote of non-confidence could be arrested by elections. But in 2005, the confidence question in parliament accelerated the people's loss of confidence. Can the parliament - which is using the most piteous of word games to rescind responsibility for upholding or overthrowing the chancellor - complain when a populist calls it a talking shop?"

Die Tageszeitung, 19.07.2005

Dirk Baecker identifies the cardinal error of the current red-green, or SPD-Green Party coalition government: "The Social Democrats and the Greens wanted to show this country that policy can come from the middle of society. They wanted to disprove the old notion that politics is a business unto itself; and to contrast this with a new program which reflected the self-understanding of a modern civil society. As though one could take the Greeks literally and conduct politics as the self-determination of the citizens and not as the control mechanism of a slave society; they set out to eliminate the gap between politics and society, and to turn society into politics."

Der Tagesspiegel, 19.07.2005

The production of Kodachrome 40, better known as Super 8 film,
is being discontinued. In a moving obituary, Bodo Mrozek looks back on
the revolution sparked by Super 8: "For the first time, people could
watch the silver screen in their own homes â and see themselves. The
investigative documentary film, the realism of the 70s and 'everyone
TV' à la Big Brother would hardly be thinkable without the
pioneers of the Super-8 camera. And it wasn't just holiday memories
that were filmed on Kodachrome. The single image technique allowed
trick films in which things could appear and disappear as if by magic.
And audiences were always thrilled to see junior's first dive into the
pool played backwards."

Saturday 11 - 17 December, 2010

A clutch of German newspapers launch an appeal against the criminalisation of Wikileaks. Vera Lengsfeld remembers GDR dissident Jürgen Fuchs and how he met death in his cell. All the papers were bowled over Xavier Beauvois' film "Of Gods and Men." The FR enjoys a joke but not a picnic at a staging of Stravinsky's "Rake's Progress" in Berlin. Gustav Seibt provides a lurid description of Napoleonic soap in the SZ. German-Turkish Dogan Akhanli author explains what it feels like to be Josef K. read more

Saturday 4 - Friday 10 December

Colombian writer Hector Abad defends Nobel Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa against European Latin-America romantics. Wikileaks dissident Daniel Domscheit-Berg criticises the new publication policy of his former employer. The Sprengel Museum has put on a show of child nudes by die Brücke artists. The SZ takes a walk through the Internet woods with FAZ prophet of doom Frank Schirrmacher. The FAZ is troubled by Christian Thielemann's unstable tempo in the Beethoven cycle. And the FR meets China Free Press publisher, Bao Pu.read more

Saturday 27 November - Friday 3 December

Danish author Frederik Stjernfelt explains how the Left got its culturist ideas. Slavenka Draculic writes about censoring Angelina Jolie who wanted to make a film in Bosnia. Daniel Cohn-Bendit talksÂ Â about his friendship, falling out and reconciliation with Jean-Luc Godard. Wikileaks has caused an embarrassed silence in the Arab world, where not even al-Jazeera reported on the what the sheiks really think. Alan Posener calls for the Hannah Arendt Institute in Dresden to be shut down.read more

Saturday 20 - Friday 26 November, 2010

The theatre event of the week came in a twin pack: Roland Schimmelpfennig's new play, a post-colonial "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" opened at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin and the Thalia in Hamburg. The anarchist pamphlet "The Coming Insurrection" has at last been translated into German and has ignited the revolutionary sympathies of at least two leading German broadsheets, the FAZ and the SZ. But the taz, Germany's left-wing daily, says the pamphlet is strongly right-wing. What's left and right anyway? came the reply.read more

Saturday 13 - Friday 19 November, 2010

Dieter Schlesak levels grave accusations against his former friend and colleague, Oskar Pastior, who spied on him for the Securitate. Banat-Swabian author and vice chairman of the Oskar Pastior Foundation, Ernest Wichner, turns on Schlesak for spreading malicious rumours. Die Zeit portrays the Berlin rapper Harris, and the moment he knew he was German. Dutch author Cees Nooteboom meditates on the near lust for physical torture in the paintings of Francisco de Zurburan. An exhibition in Mannheim displays the dream house photography of Julius Schulman.read more

Saturday 6 - Friday 12 November, 2010

The NZZ asks why banks invest in art. The FAZ gawps at the unnatural stack of stomach muscles in Michelangelo's drawings. The taz witnesses a giant step for the "Yugo palaver". Bernard-Henri Levy describes Sakineh Ashtiani's impending execution as a test for Iran and the west.Journalist Michael Anti talks about the healthy relationship between the net and the Chinese media. Literary academic Helmut Lethen describes how Ernst Jünger stripped the worker of all organic substances.read more

Saturday 30 October - Friday 5 November, 2010

Now that German TV has just beatifiedPope Pius XII, Rolf Hochmuth tells die Welt where he got the idea for his play "The Deputy". The FR celebrates Elfriede Jelinek's "brilliantly malicious" farce about the collapse of the Cologne City Archive. "Carlos" director Olivier Assayas makes it clear that the revolutionary subject is a figment of the imagination. The SZ returns from the Shanghai Expo with a cloying after-taste of sweet 'n' sour. And historian Wang Hui tells the NZZ that China's intellectuals have plenty of freedom to pose critical questions.read more

Saturday 23 - Friday 29 October, 2010

Author Doron Rabinovici protests against the concessions of moderate Austrian politicians to the FPÖ: recently in Vienna, children were sent back to Kosovo at gunpoint. Ian McEwan wonders why major German novelists didn't mention the Wall. The NZZ looks through the Priz Goncourt shortlist and finds plenty of writers with more bite than Houellebecq. The FAZ outs two of Germany's leading journalists who fiercely guarded the German Foreign Ministry's Nazi past. Jens-Martin Eriksen and Frederik Stjernfelt analyse the symptoms of culturalism, left and right. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht demonstratively yawns at German debate.read more

Saturday 16 - Friday 22 October, 2010

A new book chronicles the revolt of revolting "third persons" at Suhrkamp publishers in the wild days of 1968. Necla Kelek is appalled by the speech of the very Christian Christian Wulff, the German president, in Turkey. The taz met a new faction of hardcore Palestinians who are fighting for separate sex hairdressing in Gaza. Sinologist Andreas Schlieker reports on the new Chinese willingness to restructure the heart. And the Cologne band Erdmöbel celebrate the famous halo around the frying pan.read more

Saturday 9 - Friday 15 October, 2010

The FR laps up the muscular male bodies and bellies at the Michelangelo exhibition in the Viennese Albertina. The same paper is outraged by the cowardice of the Berlin exhibition "Hitler and the Germans". Mario Vargas-Llosa remembers a bad line from Sweden. Theologist Friedrich Wilhelm Graf makes it very clear that Western values are not Judaeo-Christian values. The Achse des Guten is annoyed by the attempts of the mainstream media to dismiss Mario Vargas-Llosa. The NZZ celebrates the tireless self-demolition of Polish writer and satirist Slawomir Mrozek.read more

Saturday 2 - Friday 8 October, 2010

Nigerian writer Niyi Osundare explains why his country has become uninhabitable. German Book Prize winner Melinda Nadj Abonji says Switzerland only pretends to be liberal. German author Monika Maron is not surethat Islam really does belong to Germany. Russian writer Oleg Yuriev explains the disastrous effects of postmodernism on the Petersburg Hermitage. Argentinian author Martin Caparros describes how the Kirchners have co-opted the country's revolutionary history. And publisher Damian Tabarovsky explains why 2001 was such an explosively creative year for Argentina.read more

Saturday 25 September - Friday 1 October

Three East German theatre directors talk about the trauma of reunification. In the FAZ, Thilo Sarrazin denies accusations that his book propagates eugenics: "I am interested in the interplay of nature and nurture." Polemics are being drowned out by blaring lullabies, author Thea Dorn despairs. Author Iris Radisch is dismayed by the state of the German novel - too much idle chatter, not enough literary clout. Der Spiegel posts its interview with the German WikiLeaks spokesman, Daniel Schmitt. And Vaclav Havel's appeal to award the Nobel prize to Liu Xiabobo has the Chinese authorities pulling out their hair.read more

Saturday 18 - Friday 24 September, 2010

Herta Müller's response to the news that poet Oskar Pastior was a Securitate informant was one of overwhelming grief: "When he returned home from the gulag he was everybody's game." Theatre director Luk Perceval talks about the veiled depression in his theatre. Cartoonist Molly Norris has disappeared after receiving death threats for her "Everybody Draw Mohammed" campaign. The Berliner Zeitung approves of the mellowing in Pierre Boulez' music. And Chinese writer Liao Yiwu, allowed to leave China for the first time, explains why schnapps is his most important writing tool.read more

Saturday 10 - Friday 17 September, 2010

The poet Oskar Pastior was a Securitate informant, the historian Stefan Sienerth has discovered. Biologist Veronika Lipphardt dismisses Thilo Sarrazin'sincendiary intelligence theories as a load of codswallop. A number of prominent Muslim intellectuals in Germany have written an open letter to President Christian Wulff, calling for him to "make a stand for a democratic culture based on mutual respect." And a Shell study has revealed that Germany's youth aspire to be just like their parents.read more

Saturday 4 - Friday 10 September, 2010

Thilo Sarrazin has buckled under the stress of the past two weeks and resigned from the board of the Central Bank. His book, "Germany is abolishing itself", however, continues to keep Germany locked in a debate about education and immigration and intelligence. Also this week, Mohammed cartoonist Kurt Westergaard has been awarded the M100 prize for defending freedom of opinion. Chancellor Angela Merkel gave a speech at the award ceremony: "The secret of freedom is courage". The FAZ interviewed Westergaard, who expressed his disappointment that the only people who had shown him no support were those of his own class. read more